Louise Fletcher, the sweet actress from Alabama who won an Academy Award for her turn as the heartless Nurse Ratched — one of the most reviled characters in movie history — in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, has died. She was 88.
Fletcher died Friday of natural causes at her home in Montdurausse, France, her son Andrew Bick told The Hollywood Reporter. She had survived two bouts with breast cancer.
A daughter of deaf parents — she made one of the most touching acceptance speeches in Oscar history — Fletcher also starred as a psychiatrist in Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) and played opposite Peter Falk amid the star-studded ensemble in The Cheap Detective (1978).
On television, she portrayed the religious leader Kai Winn Adami on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and received Emmy nominations in 1996 and 2004 for her guest-starring stints on Picket Fences and Joan of Arcadia, respectively.
She more recently played William H. Macy’s meth-dealing mother on Shameless and appeared in the Liev Schreiber film A Perfect Man (2013) and on the Netflix series Girlboss, starring Britt Robertson.
After spending more than a decade away from show business to raise her two children, Fletcher returned to Hollywood and appeared opposite Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall in the Robert Altman film Thieves Like Us (1974).
Director Milos Forman, then casting 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — based on Ken Kesey’s 1962 book about life in an Oregon psychiatric hospital — spotted her in that movie.
“He was watching it to look at Shelley Duvall to play one of the girls who comes on the ward on the party night, and there I was,” Fletcher recalled in a 2016 interview. “He said, ‘Who is that?’
“A year later, after Anne Bancroft, Angela Lansbury, Geraldine Page, Colleen Dewhurst and Ellen Burstyn all rejected the chance to play Nurse Ratched — many believing that the character was too impossibly wicked — Forman finally gave Fletcher the part.
“I tried out for it many, many times,” she said. “I didn’t realize that lots of other women were turning it down. They offered it to many movie stars who declined, luckily for me. To think, what if somebody else had said yes?”
In the film, the icy Ratched humiliates her patients and revokes their privileges on a whim. When she can’t control a new arrival, Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), she administers shock therapy on him, then has him lobotomized.
Fletcher knew her life had changed forever when she saw Cuckoo’s Nest with an audience for the first time and saw how people reacted to a scene in which McMurphy tries to kill her character.
“It was in Chicago, and it was a packed house,” she recalled. “When he strangles her, the audience stood up and yelled and cheered. Stood up. It was unbelievable. I was thrilled.”
On its 2003 list of the 100 greatest villains in the annals of motion pictures, the American Film Institute placed Nurse Ratched at No. 5, behind only Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates, Darth Vader and the Wicked Witch of the West. (Sarah Paulson recently revived the character in a Ryan Murphy prequel series for Netflix.)
After Fletcher heard her name called by presenter Charles Bronson and came to the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to accept her Oscar, she said: “Well, it looks like you all hated me so much that you’ve given me this award for it, and I’m loving every minute of it. And all I can say is, I’ve loved being hated by you.” (THR)